Here are my Research Blogging Editor’s Selections for this week. Why are casinos so good at taking your money? Sure, most of the games favor the house, but there’s more to it than that. Brad Voytek explains how casinos distract. Hazing is a problem for many college, military, and other sorts of membership-based organizations. If [...]

This marks the 500th post in the history of The Thoughtful Animal! To mark the occasion, I thought I’d revise and repost the post that started it all. This wasn’t the first post I ever wrote, but it was the first post I wrote (back when I was blogging at WordPress) that got any sort [...]

One of our regular spots when my shooting partner and I head out to take photos is the Rodeo Drive area of Beverly Hills. If nothing else, the window displays usually give us lots of variety and interesting lighting to work with. And they change often enough that there’s always something new. Lately, I’ve noticed [...]

Babel’s Dawn, a book that grew out of a blog about the natural history of speech, is probably not like any other book you’ve read. That’s because it’s not really a book about the natural history of speech: it’s a book about a (fictitious) museum that tells the story about the natural history of speech. [...]

Here are my Research Blogging Editor’s Selections for this week. How about some Valentine’s Day science on this Valentine’s Day? First, from Melanie Tannenbaum at PsySociety: are love and hate really all that different? Psych Your Mind hosts guest blogger Maya Kuehn who has all the research on speed dating in one handy blog post. [...]

Chimpanzees have a bad reputation. Maybe it’s because humans have a thing about wanting to feel unique among primates. Some have argued that humans are the only species that truly behaves altruistically, the only species that actively helps out other individuals even when there is no direct benefit. Despite mounting evidence that other animals, including [...]

Wandering around Century City last week, I thought I’d try to do a vertical panorama – 6 shots taken in vertical succession – rather than the more typical horizontal style. I really like the fish-eye style effect that it created. Click to enlarge, and as always, the rest of my photos can be found on [...]

The recent talk of ultrasonic tarsiers reminded me of a post I wrote a couple years ago. You see, tarsiers aren’t the only animal to communicate at a sound frequency beyond the level of human hearing: mice do as well. But, for some reason, some mice actually chatter in such a way that they can [...]

Here are my Research Blogging Editor’s Selections for this week. “Imagine that there was a blood test that could detect depression,” writes the Neuroskeptic. “Wouldn’t that be useful?” What can the axolotl – a weird-looking salamander – tell us about how our brains process smell? A lot, actually. Read about it at The Cellular Scale. [...]

I don’t typically like such “overbaked,” overprocessed photos. But I sort of like how this photo, taken last week at Venice Beach, came out.